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Diebold Threatens to Pull Out of North Carolina
foobaric writes "A North Carolina judge ruled that Diebold may not be protected from criminal prosecution if it fails to disclose the code behind its voting machines as required by law. In response, Diebold has threatened to pull out of North Carolina." From the article: "The dispute centers on the state's requirement that suppliers place in escrow 'all software that is relevant to functionality, setup, configuration, and operation of the voting system,' as well as a list of programmers responsible for creating the software. That's not possible for Diebold's machines, which use Microsoft Windows, Hanna said. The company does not have the right to provide Microsoft's code, he said, adding it would be impossible to provide the names of every programmer who worked on Windows."
Diebold forced out of North Carolina.
"Under pressure to comply with State Law, Diebold insead chooses to leave the field to its competitors."
"Piter, too, is dead."
Usually when you develop an embedded system, you demand code escrow from your suppliers. Microsoft is a special case though, because when they enter the conversation everybody seems to become stupid. If they had gone with any other vendor (I'm not just talking Linux here... They could have used VxWorks, QNX, BSD, one of the various DOSes...) they would have had code escrow. I bet they do for every other third party bit of software on their machine.
The list of developer names is pretty unreasonable, but code escrow is something that happens all the time, and only Microsoft manages to get out of it.
Windows CE source code is availablei censing/WindowsCE.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/L
With Windows CE, "OEM customers worldwide can create and distribute commercial derivatives of the Windows CE 5.0 operating system source code for shipping in commercial devices without notifying Microsoft or sharing their derivative works with the embedded community."
It's true that getting a total list of programmers in an open-source system would be impossible.
But as a practical matter it's impossible to name all of the Windows programmers either. The court wouldn't expect that of Diebold any more than they'd require a total list of Linux programmers from an open-source voting project.
What Diebold could easily do is name their own programmers.
Except there's no way in hell they'd want to do that.
In 2002 Diebold bought Global Election Systems, which became the Diebold Election Systems unit. Global was founded under another name in 1988 by Norton Cooper, Michael K. Graye and Charles Hong Lee...all with damned interesting resumes (footnote 1):
Norton Cooper - jail for a year mid-1980s for fraud against the Canada government; ordered out of stock pitch schemes and was part of the collapse of the Vancouver stock exchange - ordered by decree not to pitch stock after 1992 or so because he caused havoc every time. Written up by Barron's and Forbes as a "hazard to avoid at the golf course". First convicted of political corruption in 1974 - look up a Canadian case titled "The Queen v. Norton Cooper" 1977 Canadian Supreme Court.
Charles Hong Lee - stock schemes; Cooper's partner pitching deals. Defrauded Chinese immigrants, $600,000(Can) court-ordered restitution mid-90s. Sold "real estate" which was actually the bail for the third partner below to the tune of about $300,000(can) circa 1995ish.
Michael K. Graye - nailed for stealing $18mil from three companies in the '88-'89 era, caught in '94, jailed in the US for stock fraud around '94 re: Vinex wines, released around 2000 - 2002(3?) in the US, brought back to Canada, still in jail there. Arrested for tax evasion and money laundering circa '94.
Those three in turn hired even more "colorful" staff:
John Elder was a cocaine trafficker, in a WA prison early/mid 1990s...fellow inmate was Jeffrey Dean (see next entry). Handled ballot printing for Global late 1990s. Seems to have been the one to bring Dean into Global.
Jeffrey Dean was convicted early '90s of 23 counts of computer-aided embezzlement. He was a computer consultant for a large Seattle law firm and defrauded them of about $450,000 in what US courts called a "sophisticated computer-aided scheme". In a statement to Seattle PD, he claimed he needed the money because Canadians were blackmailing him; in that country, he'd gotten into a fistfight and the other guy had died. (Yes, I've seen the police report.) He joined Elder in the Global ballot printing business late '90s, and with Global's introduction was doing computer consulting with the King County WA elections division - they had no idea of his criminal record. By 2000 he was doing programming for Global and by early Oct. of 2000 he was a full employee and lead programmer for the GEMS vote-tally product still in use. By late Oct. 2000 and shipping in time for the November election, GEMS ver.1.17.5 contains the first "double set of books" problem where all votes are recorded twice internally and don't need to match...long story but it apparantly hides some forms of vote fraud. At the time Diebold bought Global in 2002, Dean quit and was immediately hired back as a consultant via management decision made within the division. This appears to be an attempt to keep Dean's criminal past out of Diebold corporate head office's scrutiny.
At the time Diebold bought Global, Dean owned 10% of Global's stock.
We don't know how many other lower-level progammers within Global/Diebold have criminal records. It's rather obvious that Diebold sure as hell doesn't want us finding out.
Footnote 1 - see also "Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering In The 21st Century" by Bev Harris, esp. the "Diebold" section at the end of Chapter 8. Free PDF downloads can be found at: http://blackboxvoting.org/
http://www.bbvdocs.org/dean.pdf
...and you'll get about 350 hits, so this is real well known among people paying attention to this stuff.
http://www.bbvdocs.org/elder.pdf
There's their criminal records.
Mention of both are extensive in the various online databases of Global/Diebold's internal memos between 1998 and early 2003. Go google:
"Jeffrey dean" diebold
To be fair, at the time Diebold bought Global Dean was moved to consultant status, possibly to avoid the Diebold corporate background check. They damned well know about him NOW of course ever since Bev Harris broke the news.
Look, Global was based out of Vancouver BC. Bev and others have gone up there to talk to current and former employees...a LOT appeared to be "coked up" or talked about rampant drug abuse up there. If what we're hearing is anywhere close to accurate, Global acted like the set of a John Belushi movie or something.
Trust me on this: ain't no WAY Diebold will want to publish lists of programmers.
Notice how Diebold talks about source code escrow as the issue in NC? It's a red herring. Diebold does source code escrow in California no problem.
The issue is the programmer names. Major-grade doom involved.
Little known fact: the source code for WinCE is fully known to the hardware vendors.
.NET stuff they stopped doing that but I could be wrong.
:).
It's unique among Windows versions in that it's not a finished product - each hardware vendor has to finish it for their own weird gear. WinCE was made to run on hardware that is NOT industry standard, everything from PDAs to TV set-top boxes.
Up through CE 3.0 you could download the entire source code from Microsoft's website. I think once they included the
At the central vote tally box, the Diebold GEMS central tabulator runs on top of WinNT/2000 series so they can't put THAT source in escrow.
Fun fact about GEMS: not only was convicted embezzler and admitted murderer Jeffrey Dean in charge of development for at least a couple of years, the program icon is a hoot. It's a fist holding a globe, basically a day-glow-colors version of the corporate logo for Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers movies
We should prowl around Diebold HQ looking for midgets, bald cats and sharks with unusual head prosthetics...
Jim March
Black Box Voting (staff)